Darkheart

The Past: Fish & Chips

There was a fishing pier that extended from the public beach out into the lake. In the winter, when ice formed on the edges of the water, it could be mesmerizing to walk to the end of that pier and look out over the cold, blue-gray sheets, try to mark where they broke and shifted into liquid, to wonder how solid the surface was, whether it'd crunch and split beneath your foot if you attempted to put pressure on it. Being at the end of the pier was also daunting, though, in those cold months; the air over the icy lake chilled you to the bone. And it could be windy, too, enough to blow you over the side if you weren't careful. Of course, that's why the railings were there.

Winter was over, though, and Kevin was glad for it. He wandered down the pier often, and sometimes he preferred the solitude of the cold, when he was the only person crazy enough to walk the football-field-length out over the water. Today was warmer, though, mid-May. It was still sweater weather, still a little bite to the air, so he'd pulled a knit cap over his messy hair, thrown a hoodie over his T-shirt, and meandered across the parking lot through the hard sand, onto the pier. Kevin didn't have a car of his own, and his house was quite a distance from this part of town, but he spent a lot of his time wandering, mostly to get away from his father and brother or to hang out with friends, so the several miles meant nothing to him. In fact, he was a fast walker, so he'd made it to the pier a good twenty minutes before the friend he was supposed to meet up with.

Today, the water was a deep, gunmetal gray. It wasn't exactly sunny out, but it was bright, so the lake had a strange luster, almost as if a layer of oil were floating atop it. The wind picked up as Kevin moved farther away from land, made his eyes leak a little, but he kept on toward the end, hands in pockets.

There were benches along the pier, running down the middle in a row, gaps in between them so walkers could shift one side to the other. Kevin recalled how, as a child, he'd loved running atop the benches, jumping from one to the next as his mother held his little hands so he wouldn't fall. She'd seemed to love him, then; when that had changed, he didn't know. It wasn't as if he'd given her reasons to continue loving him, he reflected. He'd never been a particularly good kid. There'd been an occasional fight at school when he was little, and then he'd begun receding into himself, hoping he could just be that kid in middle and high school who disappeared into the back of the room, did okay enough not to stand out in either a positive or a negative fashion. He had questionable friends, and his extracurriculars involved illegal substances, and he'd not done much, perhaps, that a parent could be proud of, never been one for sports trophies and spelling bees, LEGO masterpieces or robotics. He hadn't been any sort of angel, for sure, but he also hadn't been a horrible child, like Mike . . . still, maybe being mediocre was worse than either extreme. She'd known Mike was a lost cause, and Russ was impressionable--but him?

Well, he was forgettable, so she'd forgotten him.

Kevin arrived at the end of the pier where it ballooned out into a sort of observation deck. There were lower levels on either side where interested parties could bring fishing gear, sit and try to catch something, but he was no interested party. It was just him, so he pressed his stomach and chest up against the metal railing and stared out over the water. There should have been a freedom in it, looking out over what felt like the end of things. It should've been a signal of hope, of the certainty that he'd get out of Port Killdeer--a more optimistic person would've read something like that in the expanse beyond. But Kevin wasn't particularly optimistic, and what he saw was an impediment to freedom, as if that lake weren't a passage but a barrier. A sudden frustration pushed through him, and he shouted a string of expletives, which were quickly swallowed up by the movement of the wind and the water.

Slumping a bit, Kevin shook his head at the pointlessness of it all, and then he turned his attention to the right, where he realized something was perched on one of the pier posts. It wasn't a seagull, surprisingly--those birds were often all over but seemed scant at present. He wasn't sure what it was, but it was immobile, and it appeared to be resting solidly. As he drew near, he realized it was a fish. Or, to be precise, a fish head. Just a head. Some animal or person had stuck it up there; who knew what'd happened to the rest of it? It must've been pretty big though--a trout, maybe? Kevin didn't know a lot about fish, but the head was at least half the size of his own. The thing gaped unfortunately at him, as if it wanted to tell him something, and it looked fresh, damp, even.